A breath of French air

Zut alors, nous avons arrivee home.  Excuse the shocking french, I have just spent ten days using shocking french to communicate in lovely Brittany with the locals who then speak back to me in perfectly fluent english.  I am ashamed.  But not too ashamed to have enjoyed the slow and simple pace of life in the rural backwaters of Finistere.  I shall let the pics tell the story of our hols....

LOVE that overnight ferry crossing.  Cool, quiet, dark cabins, clean, crisp sheets, the gentle sway of the boat as it bobs across the channel....

We were lucky to have a pool at our gite, but this is Oliver attempting to get in - in a wetsuit, so it was a tad chilly....

The view across the front garden to the Chapel of St Margaret.  Embarrassed to say I didn't even cross the road to go and take a closer look at this. 

Here are the boys playing boules in the front garden.  Or petanque, whatever it's called.

The old walled city of Concarneau.  This is where I decided to be tres french, and order a crepe with 'Andouille' for lunch.  I thought Andouille was a local sausage-y thing, but when it came it looked not unlike compressed innards and smelt like pig.  Yukarooney.  I urge even thinking about it.  I will try and find a picture to share my discomfort with you.

Mark and Oliver looking relieved that they didn't order the Andouille.

A spell of unseasonal good weather saw us at Pentrez Plage.  It is such a fantastic feeling splashing around in the surf with the sun on your back.  It so takes me back to holidays as a kid in north Cornwall. 



Don't think you are supposed to feed the Giraffes grass from underneath the fence, but they seemed to like it.  As did the Wallabys, who seemed to have a hankering for acorns....

As did the Otters.

If you happen to read about the sudden unexplained demise of animals in a french zoo, then do let me know.  An autopsy may reveal an excess of visitor-fed foliage and I want to be ready if a google search should lead the investigation my way......

Look at that for a castle.  Trevarez - it is really quite breathtaking.  And it boasted this very E. Nesbit water feature in the garden:

On the last day we visited Oceanopolis in Brest, which cost a fortune and felt very not worth the money.  Nice fish though.

To be fair, they did have sharks, penguins and seals.  Not all in the same tank, I hasten to add, but I still think it was a big cost for not much.  We then headed over to Roscoff to kill a few hours before the overnight sailing home.  I expected Roscoff to be a big bustling scummy port, not unlike Plymouth, but I was massively pleasantly surprised.  We parked (free of course - in Brittany there is no avaricious need to rip people off for stopping on a few feet of land for a couple of hours) near 'centre-ville' and then trundled round the corner to an olde worlde network of streets and shoppes in buildings which had clearly been standing for hundreds of years. 

We went down one little side street and found it to back out onto the sea where we spent a jolly half hour skimming stones.

Yep, I was on this holiday too - that's me that is.  Hitherto unseen in holiday pics. That walkway jutting out behind us was good - you could walk quite a ways out over the swirling waters below and look back to the town.  Very nice little stroll after our last supper en vacances. 

So with the moon rising over the prettiness and quaintness of Roscoff, we boarded the ferry home to Plymouth, where, as we drove through at 6.30am there were people falling out of still open pubs and clubs carrying drinks and looking like the dregs of the earth.  I was deeply ashamed of the image this would portray of this part of the country, and truly feared for any foot passengers who were brave enough to walk off the ferry and into deepest darkest Plymouth.  The comparison with Roscoff was not a favourable one.


On this cheerful note, I will leave you for now.  Lots more to say, but fed up with typing now. 

Laters.